From: Alex Ferguson (abf@yeats.ucc.ie)
Date: Fri 05 Feb 1999 - 21:08:41 EET
Mike Mittmann:
> Sending a sylph straight up for five minutes carrying
> someone with Farsee made a lot of this much clearer.
> Some people are arguing that it is heretical to use
> a sylph this way.
Thery are? I don't recall anyone mentioning either heresy or
sylph-propulsion (nearly a pun, that) up till this point.
> Why? Is it also heretical to use
> one for the other things I've used them for: crossing
> chasms, throwing people up in the air in a fight,
> or a fast way to get over a guarded wall?
Possibly, but more plausible, at any rate. Leaving aside considerations
of what sort of uses of a slyph are considered religiously appropriate,
the fact that being carried by one is likely to make being put inside a
tumble drier seem like a restful and experience, argues against its
utility as a stable observation platform.
> So it comes down to how useful are maps. If in your world no one ever
> goes more than 20 miles from home, or knowing the
> terrain of an area surrounding a battlefield won't affect the battle,
> and being able to run a trade route 4 rather than 3 times a year
> won't help the merchants, and there is never a case of two orlanthi
> groups racing each other to find a wind sword, at the top of a mountain,
> somewhere in 60,000 square miles of wilderness, then no one will work to
> make good maps.
It comes down to how appropriate one feels the existence of "good maps"
are to the setting, and perhaps more so, some of the rules-rape wheezes
one might propose to try and prove they _must_ exist, would be more
like it. I think you'll find it has _not_ been suggested that accurate
maps wouldn't be useful, in fact, quite the reverse in many ways they'd
be _too_ useful, given the supposed nature of the world and the
experience of adventuring in it. That the foregoing argument is an
utter straw man it seems almost superfluous to observe, especially
given the STRAW MAN HERE manner of its postulation.
Slainte,
Alex.
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